Kierkegaard on Despair

Quote

"The self is a relation that relates itself to itself, or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself." — Søren Kierkegaard (as Anti-Climacus), The Sickness Unto Death (1849)

Author

Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher and theologian whose work, largely ignored in his own lifetime, became one of the primary sources of twentieth-century existentialism. Born in Copenhagen in 1813, he wrote with extraordinary speed and under a series of pseudonyms—Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Johannes de Silentio, Vigilius Haufniensis—each representing a different stance toward existence. This pseudonymous strategy was not a mere literary device but a philosophical method: Kierkegaard believed that truth about existence could only be communicated indirectly, because it had to be lived, not merely known.

Kierkegaard's central target was the Hegelian system that dominated nineteenth-century Danish intellectual life. Where Hegel sought to incorporate individual existence into the grand narrative of Spirit's self-development, Kierkegaard insisted that existence is irreducibly individual—that no system can capture the concrete, anxious, choosing human being. Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, The Concept of Anxiety, and The Sickness Unto Death form a sustained assault on the illusion that one can think one's way into being a self. The self is not a thought but a task—a relation that must be maintained, and that can always break down.

The pseudonym Anti-Climacus, under which The Sickness Unto Death was published, represents Kierkegaard's most elevated Christian perspective. Kierkegaard described himself as standing below this figure—unable to fully inhabit the faith that Anti-Climacus describes but pointing toward it as the ideal. The dense, almost baroque prose of the opening definition is characteristic of this pseudonym's voice: technical, precise, and deliberately difficult, as though the language itself must resist easy consumption.

Context

The Sickness Unto Death opens with the definition of the self that has become one of the most analyzed passages in existentialist philosophy. To understand it, one must work through the layers of the formula. Kierkegaard begins not with the self but with a relation. A human being, he says, is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, necessity and freedom. These are not qualities the self has but poles between which the self exists. The self is the relation between these poles—but not merely the relation as a static structure. The self is the activity of relating: the relation's relating itself to itself.

This is why the formula is so convoluted. Kierkegaard is trying to capture something that ordinary language is not built to express: that the self is not a thing but a process, not an object but an act. A relation between two terms (say, finite and infinite) is one thing. But when that relation turns back upon itself—when it becomes conscious of itself as a relation and takes a stance toward its own structure—it becomes a self. The self is this reflexive movement, this loop in which the relation grasps itself as a relation and must decide how to relate to what it is.

The key move comes next. Kierkegaard says that the self is not the relation but the relation's relating itself to itself—and that this relating must be grounded in something that established the relation. In the Christian framework of Anti-Climacus, this ground is God. The self is a relation that was not self-established, and therefore its health depends on relating itself to the power that established it. Despair is precisely the breakdown of this relation—the self's failure to relate itself to itself in the right way, which means, for Kierkegaard, the self's failure to relate itself to God as its ground.

But one does not need to share Kierkegaard's theology to find the analysis powerful. The secular kernel of the argument is that the self is a task, not a given—that being a self requires an ongoing act of integration, and that this act can fail. Despair is the name for this failure, and it is far more common than we usually think.

Meaning

The opening definition sets up Kierkegaard's analysis of despair, which constitutes the body of the book. Despair, he argues, is not a feeling. It is not sadness, grief, or the emotional response to misfortune. It is a structural condition—a misrelation within the self. The self is supposed to relate itself to itself in a way that is grounded in the power that established it. When this grounding fails, the self falls into despair. And because despair is a structural misrelation rather than an emotion, it can exist without any accompanying feeling of sadness. This is why Kierkegaard makes his most provocative claim: the vast majority of people are in despair without knowing it.

Kierkegaard identifies two fundamental forms of despair, corresponding to the two directions in which the misrelation can occur. The first is the despair of not willing to be oneself—the desperate attempt to escape the self one is. This can take the form of immersion in the crowd, in social roles, in distractions of every kind. The person who lives entirely through what others think of him, who has no inwardness, who is nothing but what the world has made him—this person is in despair because he refuses to be the self he is. He is, in Kierkegaard's phrase, "spiritlessly" existing, and this spiritlessness is itself the deepest form of the disease.

The second form is the despair of willing to be oneself—but on one's own terms, without acknowledging the power that established the self. This is the defiant self, the one who says, "I will be myself, but I will be myself by my own strength, on my own ground." This form of despair is closer to the surface—it has intensity, passion, inwardness—but it is still despair because it refuses the self's dependence on something beyond itself. For Kierkegaard, both forms share a common structure: the self tries to be itself without properly relating to its ground, and this improper relation is the sickness unto death.

The title's reference to death is significant. Kierkegaard argues that despair is the sickness unto death because the self in despair cannot die. Physical death ends biological life, but the despairing self is trapped in a state where it cannot cease to be itself and cannot become properly itself either. It is a living death—a condition of being unable to either live fully or escape. This is what gives Kierkegaard's analysis its peculiar urgency: despair is not something that afflicts a few unhappy people. It is the default condition of the unexamined life, and escaping it requires an act of awakening that most people never perform.

The philosophical significance of this passage extends far beyond its theological framework. It anticipates virtually every major theme of twentieth-century existentialism. The idea that the self is a task rather than a given appears in Heidegger's analysis of authenticity, Sartre's claim that existence precedes essence, and Camus's confrontation with the absurd. The distinction between the two forms of despair—escaping the self and defying the ground—maps onto Sartre's distinction between the two forms of bad faith: denying one's transcendence by reducing oneself to facticity, and denying one's facticity by pretending to be pure transcendence. And the claim that most people are in despair without knowing it resonates through the entire tradition's suspicion of complacency, conformity, and the unexamined life. Anxiety, for Kierkegaard, is the mood in which the self becomes aware of its own freedom and its own danger—and the passage from anxiety to despair, or from anxiety to faith, is the existential drama that his entire authorship attempts to stage.

Further Reading

For the full analysis, see Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death and the related Fear and Trembling for the companion analysis of faith and anxiety. Kierkegaard's earlier exploration of anxiety in The Concept of Anxiety provides the groundwork for the account of despair. For how later existentialists transformed these concepts, see Sartre on bad faith for the parallel analysis of self-deception, and Heidegger on thrownness for the structural account of the self as always already situated. Our entry on anxiety traces the concept from Kierkegaard through the existentialist tradition.